A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
I
WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the
men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the
women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no
one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in
at least ten years.
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated
with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome
style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select
street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even
the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left,
lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and
the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had
gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in
the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of
Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of
hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when
Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro
woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes,
the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity.
Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris
invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had
loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business,
preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris'
generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could
have believed it.
When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and
aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the
first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there
was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the
sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her
himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in
reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing
calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at
all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.
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